The hoodie held flecks of green paint, as though she had attempted some sort of camouflage.
It was an accident.
Everything seemed to be.
Her third time in the ditch -you could fancy up the term, but it was a ditch-Dale happened by walking his Cocker Spaniel.
Her head wasn’t visible from the road, and she liked that, but mostly she liked dipping her feet in the shallow water, no matter that she knew it was dirty, oily.
She and Dale had been lovers once, and when he left he shook her hand like he was a salesman, and she was someone not interested in buying.
She came back, reluctantly after that encounter, because she loved the tiny yellow flowers that grew in the ditch.
She always said a little prayer to an earth and sky goddess she had created in her mind, for the injured duck that she stopped to help, the day she discovered this ditch, these yellow flowers.
She wrote a song about the ditch, and almost played it at Mounlove’s, but she didn’t wish her ditch to become a thing to be found.
Today she saw a sheen of oil cover her foot, purple and translucent gold, beautiful but created for an ugly reason.
As she watched it shimmer, floating down the trickle at the nadir of the ditch, a chaos erupted.
The percussion and screech of metal striking metal, asphalt grinding off rubber, glass spiderwebbing and falling to the gravel at the side of the road.
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